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From Sanchia Berg for the BBC: “In the summer of 1944, in a village in German-occupied western France, a slim young woman with dark hair and grey-green eyes sat in a building with a wireless set, tapping out messages in Morse code. She was an agent in the Special Operations Executive, known as Churchill’s Secret Army. Her codename was Genevieve and she was sending urgent messages back to London. The messages being sent by Genevieve were vital intelligence, as they included precise locations for the RAF to bomb, as well as where to drop equipment. Working behind German lines, as the fighting grew closer, was incredibly dangerous, but she never lost her nerve. Genevieve’s real name was Phyllis Latour. After she married, she became known as Pippa Doyle, and rarely spoke about her wartime career.”

Unraveling 40 years of sexual misconduct at a single California high school

From Matt Drange for Insider: “Clara didn’t think much of it when the social science teacher gave her his phone number. She’d met Alex Rai in her fifth-period journalism class. He was friends with the journalism teacher, Eric Burgess, and often stopped by Room 16 during his prep period to kill time. Burgess introduced Rai to Clara, telling her that Rai had been his student a decade before. Burgess thought they’d get along. In the weeks that followed, Rai would perch on Clara’s desk, leaning over as he asked about her day and who she hung out with after school. He’s only a few years older than my sister, Clara thought when Rai texted her one day after volleyball practice.”

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Continue reading “Phyllis Latour: The secret life of a WW2 heroine revealed”

From Ian Sample for The Guardian: “When the blast from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius reached Herculaneum in AD79, it burned hundreds of ancient scrolls to a crisp in the library of a luxury villa and buried the Roman town in ash and pumice. The disaster appeared to have destroyed the scrolls for good, but nearly 2,000 years later researchers have extracted the first word from one of the texts, using artificial intelligence to peer deep inside the delicate, charred remains. The discovery was announced on Thursday by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and others who launched the Vesuvius challenge in March to accelerate the reading of the texts. Seales and his team released thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments, along with a program they had trained to read letters in the scrolls based on subtle changes in the structure of the papyrus.”

Flipped coins found not to be as fair as thought

From Bob Yirka at Phys.org: “A large team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions across Europe, has found evidence backing up work by Persi Diaconis in 2007 in which he suggested tossed coins are more likely to land on the same side they started on, rather than on the reverse. The team conducted experiments designed to test the randomness of coin flipping and posted their results on the arXiv preprint server. For many years, the coin toss (or flip) has represented a fair way to choose between two options—which side of a team goes first, for example, who wins a tied election, or gets to eat the last brownie. Over the years, many people have tested the randomness of coin tossing and most have found it to be as fair as expected—provided a fair coin is used.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Researchers use AI to read a scroll burned by Vesuvius”

From Adam Mastroianni at Experimental History: “There’s something very weird about the timeline of scientific discoveries. For the first few thousand years, it’s mostly math. The Greeks had the beginnings of trigonometry by ~120 BCE. Chinese mathematicians figured out the fourth digit of pi by the year 250. In India, Brahmagupta devised a way to “interpolate new values of the sine function” in 665. Meanwhile, we didn’t discover things that seem way more obvious until literally a thousand years later. It’s not until the 1620s, for instance, that English physician William Harvey figured out how blood circulates through animal bodies by, among other things, spitting on his finger and poking it into the heart of a dead pigeon. We didn’t really understand heredity until Gregor Mendel started gardening in the mid-1800s, and we didn’t really grasp the basics of learning until Ivan Pavlov started feeding his dogs in the early 1900s.”

The MacArthur Genius who discovered that COVID transmission was airborne

From Gabriel Spitzer for NPR: “To understand why the MacArthur Foundation singled out Linsey Marr for one of this year’s fellowships – the so-called “genius grants” –  you have to go back to the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The early guidance from health experts emphasized washing hands and keeping six feet from others with no recommendation to wear masks or avoid gathering indoors. Linsey Marr, an aerosols expert and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, became convinced that advice was based on a flawed idea of how respiratory viruses spread. Her groundbreaking research and tireless advocacy showed that the virus is airborne as opposed to traveling in large droplets that fall with gravity. That work helped lead to a course correction in the public health guidelines and likely saved lives.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Why did some discoveries take so much longer than others?”

Three years ago, a House of Representatives subcommittee on antitrust released a four-hundred-plus page report that detailed the allegedly anti-competitive practices of the four major digital platforms—Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta (then known as Facebook)—and called on the Department of Justice to take action. A few weeks later, the government did exactly that, filing a landmark antitrust lawsuit against Google in which it alleged that the company engaged in various anti-competitive practices, including a multibillion-dollar deal that made Google the default search engine on Apple phones. As I wrote for CJR at the time, some observers saw the suit as an attempt by William Barr, then the attorney general, to make the Trump administration look tough on tech; others saw it as correcting what many believed to be the antitrust failures of the past two decades. But many analysts also foresaw  a legal quagmire, arguing that the case was likely to be substantially weaker than the federal government’s landmark antitrust action that put the brakes on Microsoft in 1998.

The Justice Department continued to build its case against Google under the Biden administration, and last month, the case arrived in court. According to the suit, Google—which has a market value of almost two trillion dollars—controls more than 90 percent of the online search market. (Its dominance of the search advertising market is the subject of a separate lawsuit that has yet to reach trial.) The Justice Department intends to prove that Google has abused this search monopoly in order to harm its competitors, and that the company has maintained the monopoly through illegal means. (For more details of the arguments, read my newsletter previewing the case just as it was getting underway.)

Observers have compared the Google lawsuit and the 1998 case against Microsoft on various substantive grounds. But legal experts have pointed to one striking difference between the two: whereas the Microsoft trial—including video testimony and other documents—was open to the public, the Google trial has been shrouded in a high level of secrecy. As Caitlin Vogus described it for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, Amit Mehta, the judge hearing the Google case, has already imposed measures limiting transparency—including the sealing of documents and testimony, asking the Justice Department to remove exhibits that were presented in court from the public internet, and the refusal to provide the kind of audio broadcast used in the Microsoft trial.

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “Google trial shrouded in secrecy as Amazon gets its own antitrust case”

From Katie Hafner at Scientific American: “Christine Essenberg had an unusual life and career trajectory. She was married, then divorced and earned her Ph.D. in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, at age 41. She went on to become one of the early researchers at what is now the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We know the story of Christine Essenberg only because of a serendipitous find. While searching in an archive jammed with the papers of male scientists, host Katie Hafner came across a slim folder, called “Folder 29,” in the back of a box at the University of California, San Diego, Library’s Special Collections & Archives. There were just eight pages inside to use as a jumping-off point to flesh out a life, which raises the question: How many other unknown women in science are out there, hidden away in boxes?”

How I became a victim of the great Zelle swimming pool scam

From Devin Friedman at Insider: “I was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, and thin short-sleeved dress shirts. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn’t get out again. Gary spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “A chance discovery reveals an early female oceanographer”

From Marco Giancotti at Nautilus: “A synthetic female voice speaks into my ears over the electronic clamor: “top hat.” I close my eyes and I imagine a top hat. For most people, this should be a rather simple exercise, perhaps even satisfying. For me, it’s a considerable strain, because I don’t “see” any of those things. As soon as I close my eyes, what I see are not everyday objects, animals, and vehicles, but the dark underside of my eyelids. I can’t willingly form the faintest of images in my mind. And I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head. I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses. I know what a top hat is. I can describe its main characteristics. I can even draw an above-average impression of one on a piece of paper for you. But I can’t visualize it mentally.”

Note: Some of you who know me will know that this is a topic close to my heart, since I also have this condition. I wrote more about it here.

Aaron Burr pretended to start a water company but actually created a bank

From John Jansen at Why Is This Interesting: “In the late 1790s, following the new US Constitution’s adoption, New York City was enjoying a period of commercial growth and expanding population, but the city lacked a supply of clean water. Aaron Burr observed the need for a healthy water supply and devised a plan to employ the local demand for water into a vehicle he could use to enrich himself. He proposed the creation of a private company—the Manhattan Company—that would provide clean water for street cleaning and firefighting as well as the infrastructure for the project by laying pipes. But Burr had no real intention of conducting business as a water company: what he really wanted to do was start a bank, as his rival Hamilton had done, founding the Bank of New York in 1784. So just before his Manhattan Company was approved, Burr inserted a clause in the bill giving his company the power to function as a bank.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “When you picture something in your mind but nothing happens”

From David Pierson at the New York Times: “The boy had seemed destined for a life of affluence and earthly pursuits. Born into the family behind a major mining conglomerate in Mongolia, he might have been picked to someday lead the company from its steel-and-glass headquarters in the country’s capital. Instead, the 8-year-old is now at the heart of a struggle between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese Communist Party. On a visit to a vast monastery in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, known for a towering Buddha statue gilded in gold, his father brought him and his twin brother into a room where they were given a secret test. The children were shown a table strewn with religious objects. Some of them refused to leave their parents’ sides. This boy, A. Altannar, was different. He picked out a set of prayer beads and put it around his neck. He rang a bell used for meditation. He walked over to a monk in the room.”

Researchers are hoping AI can help them design new psychedelics for therapeutic use

From Natasha Boyd for Pioneer Works: “People have been doing psychedelics for at least three thousand years, and yet our understanding of how these substances interact with our nervous systems is still in its infancy. Until recently, illegality hampered clinical research. Even now, as some psychedelics pass the threshold to decriminalization, large-scale trials remain few and far between—a problem for research into such a variable experience. The temperamental nature of psychedelics is essential to their appeal. Drug nerds love to share their unique experiences with each other. To the researcher, this same variability represents a bottleneck. Last year, however, a group of interdisciplinary researchers announced a simple but powerful work-around: using AI and brain imaging, they found a way to draw directly from the experiences of some of the internet’s psychonauts—potentially paving the way for a new class of hybrid drugs.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “An 8-year-old boy is at the heart of a fight over Tibetan Buddhism”